Published: Friday, March 8, 2013 at 9:41 a.m.

Last Modified: Friday, March 8, 2013 at 9:41 a.m.

The U.S. Justice Department seeks to upend a lawsuit intended to reveal who aided President Barack Obama in drafting nearly two dozen executive orders targeting gun-related violence.

Describing the accusations by the conservative group Freedom Watch as “bare,” the administration’s lawyers want a judge to toss the case, which was filed in Ocala, because it was launched in the wrong place and because its claims about Obama’s supposedly unlawful behavior have been dismissed by other courts.

In an interview Wednesday, Larry Klayman, the founder of Freedom Watch, said he will soon answer the government’s motion to dismiss.

“I’ve spent my career prying information out of government,” he said. “I think we’ve got a good shot, and people on the left, right or center should be interested.”

In his lawsuit, filed in January, Klayman maintains that Obama, in an attempt “to limit and infringe gun ownership rights under the Second Amendment,” violated a federal law governing the formation of presidential advisory committees.

That refers to the effort Obama called for on Dec. 19 in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

He placed Vice President Joe Biden in charge of developing the recommendations, and on Jan. 16, Obama announced 23 executive orders that resulted from its work.

Klayman maintains that Obama formed an official task force to address the issue and thus was obligated by federal law to reveal the committee’s membership.

In addition, Klayman argues that Obama failed to comply with federal open-government laws by not providing access to the committee’s meetings and documents.

In court documents filed last week, the government’s lawyers cite several reasons why the case should be thrown out.

For one thing, Freedom Watch filed the lawsuit in the wrong place.

Freedom Watch “does not have its principal place of business in this district, the relevant events did not occur in this district, and the subject records are not located in this district. Nor do the defendants reside in this district,” argues Daniel Bensing, senior counsel for the Justice Department’s civil division in Washington.

Bensing in this instance is representing U.S. Attorney Robert O’Neill, the federal government’s chief prosecutor in Florida’s Middle District, which ranges from Fort Myers to Jacksonville.

Since none of the key players nor the records are located in Ocala, the case ought to have been filed in Washington, Bensing adds.

In his complaint, Klayman says he “conducts business and has a presence” in Ocala.

Klayman’s presence in Ocala includes his self-appointed role as the “citizens’ prosecutor” leading something called the “citizens grand jury,” of which Marion County is the home.

The grand jury mimics one called by the court system. Last April, Klayman wrote on the group’s website that it was the “only one strong legal mechanism” that could hold government officials accountable.

Ocala was also home to Klayman’s campaign headquarters during his 2004 bid to be the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Courts have held that FACA cannot be enforced through legal actions brought by private citizens or groups, Bensing writes.

Bensing acknowledges that Freedom Watch could have challenged FACA under a different law — the Administrative Procedure Act — but he indicated that route would have been fruitless as well.

The U.S. Supreme Court, he notes, has determined that neither the president nor the vice president constitute a federal “agency” whose actions are subject to judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Moreover, the Biden group is not subject to those laws because it was not created as a formal task force according to laws outlining the mandate of such committees, Bensing observes.

Rather, it exists only as an “unknown, imagined entity,” solely defined by Freedom Watch, he adds.

Bensing notes that advisory committees composed completely of government employees are not subject to FACA, and that even if private citizens attended the meetings, Freedom Watch cannot demonstrate they were voting members, a level of participation that may invoke oversight under the law.

He writes that the courts set that standard in blocking the release of information about an energy-policy task force run by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was sued by environmental groups and Judicial Watch, another Klayman-founded organization.

Bensing suggests that Klayman engaged in judge-shopping by filing the case in Ocala instead of Washington, where Klayman would have to submit to the threshold set in the Cheney case.

It’s clear that Biden took advice from people outside of government.

In tasking Biden with developing the policy recommendations, Obama told reporters in December that this “team” would include members of the cabinet and “outside organizations.”

In a Jan. 10 posting on the White House’s official blog, staffers noted that Biden had met the day before with “victims’ groups and gun safety organizations.”

The vice president also had scheduled to meet with elected leaders at the state and local levels as well as “advocates for sportsmen and women and gun ownership groups” and representatives of the “entertainment and video game” industries, according to the White House blog.

Klayman said in the interview that recent history has shown presidents never designate these panels as official bodies, but they appoint and empower people outside of government as members and allow them to go forward with “presidential authority.”

Those meetings lay the foundation for Biden’s sessions amounting to an official advisory committee, he added.

“I’m very, very skeptical of excess government power, and this administration in particular is acquiring power like we’ve never seen before,” Klayman said. “The government is delving more and more into people’s private lives, and I see this as the first step to confiscating guns.”

“I want to see what they’re promising, the going back and forth. I want to see the quid pro quo for both sides,” he said. “They brought in all these lobbyists, but they shut out the American people. That’s a formula for corruption.”

Contact Bill Thompson at 867-4117 or at bill.thompson@starbanner.com.

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